The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Typically, data is sent between computing devices across a communications network in packets. The packets may be generated according to a variety of protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), or the like. During transmission, packets may be lost, corrupted, or received out of order. In these instances, the computing device sending the packets may have to resend the packets or the receiving application may have methods for coping with missing or corrupted packets. Either way the impairments are undesirable.
Forward packet recovery methods provide for generating and transmitting additional parity packets across a communications network. The parity packet contains information that can be used to reconstruct or replace one or more corrupted or lost packets at the receiver side. Parity packets are traditionally sent in a ratio based on a number of data packets transmitted. For example, one parity packet may be sent per five data packets. However, since the number and amount of parity information is based on a number of data packets transmitted, the amount of network bandwidth needed for transmission of these packets is unpredictable, at least because data packets can be of varying sizes.
Thus, there is a need for a mechanism for transmitting error correcting information to repair or replace data based on a number of bytes transmitted, rather than based on a number of packets transmitted across one or more communication networks, to accommodate for constrained network resources.